Tuesday, November 15, 2016

floats

Layers of dreams (as in dreams of being asleep)... I was having a full evening of teaching at home -except it wasn't my tiny flat in North London, it was a big house in several floors; my teaching room was somewhere in one of those upstairs stories but I never went there in the room. There was an improbable queue of pupils both from the present and the distant past. I wasn't going to have enough time for all those lessons and I was running late. But then appeared this beautiful woman who was supposed to be my friend (but I didn't know and she doesn't correspond to anybody in 'real life') and asked me, would I take long? we had to go to the Slimelight together. I'm tired and bored, she said, and leant against me. Our lips met as if by accident and then the pupils and the lessons all disappeared. How irresponsible of dream-flavio...

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Cat. It's the Michy, the last one, except he's blacker rather than chocolate now. He'd gone away and been found and I had to take him back home across the city, didn't have the car with me or even a cat-carrying basket. He didn't want to go and was grabbing, clinging on to me, all sharp nails and paws but bolting, trying to escape. The journey across the city towards the West where I lived was long -public transport was full of glaring lights and glaring people with angry faces, the long streets I had to walk were grey and menacing, shrouded in twilight. Finally made it home, walked up the steps and had to juggle between holding the cat -still trying hard to escape- and fiddling in my pockets looking for the keys. Made it inside. It didn't feel like my house, something was not right. The key opened the door, it was the address I remembered but inside the house everything was unknown, strange and with the dust of years covering the old furniture, the fake marble floors, the absurd plaster decorations on the walls. I let the cat down and he ran to hide under the piano. Piano? Since when did I have a piano? As I remembered I was renting this place, sharing it with people but there was nobody in the house. The cat glared at me from under the piano. He still wasn't happy. What place have you brought me to, he seemed to be saying.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

After days of turmoil in the real world, the dreams I dream....

Ok, first the dream. I was coming back from somewhere and a gang started shooting at us. With guns. This didn't feel quite as strange as it should have done, seemed to be quite a natural thing in the dream. Even stranger, we had guns too. I was given a handgun by my friend as well as the clip to go in it, which I fumbled with while the guys on the other side kept shooting at us. It finally went in and I started shooting back thinking that this gun was surprisingly light in weight, not at all like a solid metal object at all. Bullets kept ricocheting all around me, making chunks of wood and masonry fly out. I turned around to ask my friend why we were there and in such a situation but my friend was very still, face down on the floor. It had to be a dream and I better wake up, seeing it was daylight and checking the time on my phone to find it was 5:00 am only, too early to get up, too late to try and fall asleep and gain an hour or two more restful sleep.

There were other dreams, one involving the old house in Catia but I remember even less detail from that one. As often happens, I’m moving back after a long time away, I don’t seem to have most of my things with me –not my guitars, or my computers. There is a guitar but it is the old battered guitar I used to have when I started to study music. I also found a computer, an old Apple Mac Performa with a strangely heavy keyboard with a long coiled cable. I knew I could make it work if I could find a monitor that the machine could drive but it probably was too old to be of any use with modern internet. I mentioned this and somebody in the house told me that wouldn't be a problem as it would receive the Internet of twenty years ago by the day. What, I replied, AOL and Geocitiies? Good grief.

The house seemed to be parceled in rooms and bed-sits each let separately. There was an old man that I thought at first was my granddad but wasn’t. My sisters was present–she didn’t live in the house but she kept rooms there. The roofs were leaky as always and there were buckets of different sizes everywhere catching the falling drops. I sat on the bed in my room wondering how I was going to make a living in this place that I no longer knew. How had this all happened? I couldn't remember at all.

This time I didn’t realize it was a dream at all –I even fretted about the strange circumstances as I woke up.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

through the mist of the world of dreams

There is always a journey, made complicated by the fact that roads don't always lead somewhere, lifts sometimes don't go to all the floors and you have to get off half-way and find your way through the maze of the building you're in (ah, but that's not that different from the building I live in in the real world), people can merge or be something very different to what they are in waking life. There is always a wait for something that will happen that nearly always turns out to be something else to what you were expecting. In the beginning there is a drifting downwards into the many worlds inside; at the end there is the return to the one world, trying to grasp what we left behind or its significance but you can't, it's gone and tonight it will be a different world with a different meaning.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

taxi ride

11/01/2015 10:56

On the way out of that party I had decided that, as I was in an unfamiliar part of the city, maybe I should take a mini-cab rather than wait for a night bus -didn't know what buses there were or where the bus stop was, in any case. I can't remember whether I called for the taxi or whether I hailed it on the street; in any case, I was now in the car and the driver started to talk non-stop, in English at first and then in Spanish. The journey was taking a long, long time and we were going through some rather bleak neighbourhood, with very poor housing and signs of dereliction everywhere. I asked him how far we were from Kentish Town. He replied 'Kentish-on-top-of-the-hill is very near, we're getting to the top of Cortijos de Lourdes'.'What?' I replied, 'this is not where I'm going, you have to go back, I need to go to Kentish Town not Petare!'. 'Sorry, mate, I will do; we need to stop here for a bit, though; it is a very friendly house and they'll like you'. I thought I was being kidnapped, of course. Out of the rather ramshackle house in question came some people including children. Still protesting, they led me into the house. How's London. Would I like some tea. The driver was still talking all the time but apparently just to himself. I noticed the loud green shirt he was wearing. The children asking me lots of questions. I took out my iPhone (or what was supposed to be an iPhone; it had keyboard including play-rewind keys) to see whether it could tell me where I was through GPS but it couldn't fix a signal. One of the kids produced a smaller, much battered version of the same device "I've got one of those..." said proudly. I still insisted, I needed to get home and out of here, the driver wasn't around any more. I asked where he was. 'He's at the children's pool', came the answer. I need to speak to him, I said. Show me where that is. I came out to a yard, we went past a place with some screens inside which there was an inflatable children's pool. Beyond that, there were a group of men playing bolas criollas, amongst them my driver in his loud green shirt. Completely drunk. Oh god, I said; how can I get a taxi out of here? 'At this time of night?' came the reply, with a laugh, 'pretty much impossible. You could walk out of here but it would take many hours ... if you made it out at all. Pretty rough, around here'. Where was I going to stay? I didn't even know where I was. That's where I woke up. When I finally fell asleep again, was dreaming of hijacking the taxi driver's car and just drive out of there but as I didn't know the area my only aim was to go down the hill and soon I was lost. Woke up again. Fell asleep again, to dream I was staying in that man's car, in the freezing cold of the night, while shadows and voices crept out on the streets outside. Finally woke up for real, in shivers, in my little flat far away from whatever nightmarish place my mind had visited in my sleep.

Saturday, November 08, 2014

snapshots from a dream

Dreams bringing other worlds and many versions of this world. Look for the bus station to catch that bus to Aylesbury, while a planet, or is it the moon, furiously glows and roils in the dark sky. Go past a house that whispers secrets and memories, forgotten as soon as I hear them, leaving only a puzzle and a longing. The bus sets out and I have to stand for the long journey. This time I haven't forgotten anything, haven't left my guitar home, or my phone -although phones are useless here. And, how do I know that? It's getting near dark and the cones of light from the headlamps probe the dark road ahead, moving further into this reality, maybe making it possible for it to exist.

Monday, October 20, 2014

manifold

Lots of dreams of travelling, but always with some big glitch. The most common one is forgetting to bring something important, or leaving something at a train station (if that's what it is, it's sometimes not clear at all what I've been travelling on, or I'm aware of the dream as I have arrived to the place). Also, once I'm there, staying in places where I have to share with many strangers, odd bathroom arrangements where there are several sets of multiple cubicles but most are broken or all are busy.

Having been reading novels set in a manifold universe may have to do with the fact that I keep dreaming alternative versions of the same story (except I have been having those dreams since long before I started reading any of those books..), with different outcomes or different settings -of course, I have always had the 'theme' dreams, where there are different versions of a similar narrative, most notably the Evil dream, where I have to fight this entity which will, I know this from the start, win in the end. I will appear to have won at some point and sometimes in the dream I even believe it, even though I know what will happen next, but in the end the thing or entity always destroys me. Curiously, sometimes I am detached from myself and see F (that is, me) hiding in the ruins of his old house in Caracas, or fighting back and almost winning. Sometimes, even, I am in part the evil entity itself as well as the tiny human being fighting it.

There are other strands of many-alternative-narratives, like the having lived somewhere else in Europe all these years, a place that wasn't England. Sometimes these tie in with the recurrent theme of having gone back to Caracas and some crisis prevents me from coming back here, where all the bits of my life (and my stuff, my computers and guitars, my books and my pupils) are.

Monday, September 01, 2014

iterations

21/08/2014 12:40

It begins with a theatre play. Well, no, it doesn't; there was a lot before but it has been erased. So now I'm sitting on the second row, while the boys on stage are being punished for something, their behaviour to the their girlfriends, and a huge Santa-like character bangs them over the head with a big styrofoam truncheon while his assistant rifles their pockets and loose change, wallets, bits of paper and fluff fall on the stage. I look back and I see her. Both of them, in different points in the hall, both look at me and smile in different ways.

This is going to be a residential event and I'm going to be here for a whole week; now I'm cuddling with her in a corner, wondering what happens next, while she (is it another instance of her? what is this?) watches me down from a mezzanina. She with me stirs and sits in front of me crossing her legs and holding my hands. I don't really understand how this all works and begin to say so but she puts a finger on her lips. Maybe it must not be said. She up there is making like she isn't looking down at us. I get the feeling that she can see me but she can't see her because ti is herself... I don't know why. It is all a mystery.

At the end of the week it is the play again. I sit on the front row and the play begins and this time it is clear what is being represented as I've seen it unfold during the week, but at the same time none of it has happened and it's all here for the first time. And half way through the play I realise that I should have been on stage performing, but I don't know my part. I get up and make as if trying to go back to my seat from the stage but something, an invisible wall stops me and I bounce off it and fall on the stage. Except the wall is at the same time something I'm making up onstage and something real. I cannot go back. I look for her in the audience (who look at me with puzzlement) but neither of her is present....

Sunday, July 20, 2014

diversions

Got lost and went past my stop. I asked the person next to me where I was. they looked at me with supreme disdain and something like distrust. I had to guess that we had gone past the Magallanes hospital and were sort of near Gramovén. Got off the bus trying to get my bearings. It was complicated, this going back home thing, as I was pretty sure none of us would be living in our old house any longer, how could I justify staying there? But then I thought my granddad would still be there. Wasn't he dead, though? I was convinced he would be there. This was some distance away, though; I was in the wrong place and didn't know exactly where I was or how to get back. The steep street died in the middle of nowhere and I had to get through traversing houses and gardens -or rather overgrown front yards full of junk, wire, pieces of plastic. I found myself in a house where the girls of the family asked me whether I needed any help. I said I needed to find my way to Magallanes. They looked at one another with some concern. Won't be very easy and it is not very safe out there. And you're carrying that, one said. Yes, I was carrying my best concert guitar in a shiny case and also two guitars without any kind of cover, which would make my progress both awkward and more risky, as the local thugs would spot prey very quickly. I thanked the older of the girls for their help, she said have my card -there was a little pigeonhole box on the wall with tiny visit cards, apparently each of the girls had their own set. I picked it up -there was just an email address in it, no phone number. I said it might be helpful to have her number in case I got lost or something (but would my phone work here? I thought) and she said 'yes of course it would' and smiled but didn't give me her number. The father appeared and thanked me for the visit and showed me out saying it was a pity I had to go so soon... while steering me out of the house. Outside, dirt lanes mixed with complicated architecture. I came to the end of that particular lane, a stream of people coming the other way -and completely stopped; they needed to get past me, I needed to carry on. But then I realised they were coming from a sheer wall with a sort of scaffolding ladder. I would not be able to descend on that laden with three guitars.. I moved aside and yes, I found another, much longer way. It was going to be a long way, indeed.

Monday, June 16, 2014

key

You/she had told me to go to your/her house and collect a house key from you so we could do a lesson. It was quite late in the evening but I was let in, made to wait in a reception room while various members of the family went to and fro; I had to explain to several of them why I was there at that time of day, she knows you are here? then please wait. I waited. At some point a little girl came in, said "hello, my name is Shanti, who are you?" I explained to her that F had asked me to come to collect a key and she perhaps should be made aware that I was in the house. "ok, I'll go fetch her", she said and disappeared.
The house was getting busier with more and more people, family members and staff of some sort or another, going up and down the stairs and casting long glances at me. A young man in a suit with a tag on a lanyard asked me, like so many of them before, whether he could help, I repeated my story and he bid me to come upstairs with him to the next level -but he couldn't take me to the top floor, where F should be, as that wasn't allowed. I'd have to stay there. I said perhaps I should phone her; he said it might not be a good idea, I should not bother F and just wait to be called ... I completed the sentence, "... because it is nearly midnight". I still took out my phone but the screen was smudged and sliding my finger to open it didn't work. I tried to clean it but now the screen had gone white, the 'slide to open' words still waving across but not responding. I thought of restarting it but it would take too long and the young man seemed to be getting impatient. I started explaining to him in more detail but then stopped, what, none of it made any sense and I needed to wake up....

Thursday, June 12, 2014

dream with tiger

Woke up, she’d left the room. I felt a stab of the old loneliness, I knew she wasn’t going to come back. The tiger had come into the room. Came and lied next to me, nuzzling its head into my hand as if it were a kitten. But it was not a kitten, it was a monster three times as heavy as I was, who could kill me with barely noticing it. It made affectionate cuddling movements with its head and finally fell asleep. I, as quietly as I could, got up and slowly and quietly left the room. Didn’t close the door to avoid waking it up -that door, in any event, wouldn’t have lasted that animal a second. Out in the corridor, rain was seeping through the roof everywhere. There were bits of broken masonry everywhere. I needed the loo but the bathroom was destroyed. I was alone in a wrecked house with a tiger. I felt desperately, desperately lonely.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

returns

I had to sleep in my granddad's room. I hadn't lived in the house for a long time but much of my old stuff was still there. I was trying to figure out the tv set, which had archaic looking connectors I'd never seen, so I couldn't connect my laptop to it. There were several TV sets in the room, all old glass CRTs. Also, there was something odd about the stations they were tuned to. I tried to scan the channels, it had a sort of dual band thing like the old UHF-VHF and some of the channels came up on several of the frequencies -but none was clear, they all had a heavy snow of static or the pixelling break-down of more recent, digital equipment.
I had to sleep on that bed? There was a lot of stuff in there, on and by the side of it. A blanket that smelled rather funny. Pick it up (rather gingerly) and put it to that side over there. A sort of wooden bucket. Various other bits and pieces that I couldn't identify what they were or their purpose. Then I had the thought -nobody'd told me what'd happened to my granddad. I had the absolutely certain thought that he was in hospital in a bad way with something very serious. Went downstairs to ask my dad, even though I knew he and the granddad (my mum's father) weren't in speaking terms. Why didn't he tell me. He didn't seem to be in the house, a group of men were. The tenants, I thought. They were renting half the house, the door was open and they seemed to have a party of sorts. My friend Sam (who never has been to Caracas in the real world) was with them, I asked her and she said my dad had been and gone out, he'd taken my granddad to hospital. Did she know where he went? She shrugged. No idea. The day was drawing to an end, there were yellow lights outside in the fog...

Friday, March 28, 2014

behind the curtain of dreams

Had again, after a long time, The Dream last night, in a very minor version. The immeasurably big evil (if that's the word) entity was about to arrive for the final battle and mop up and I was with a group of people that seemed to think dancing naked outside would generate some energy that would counteract the evil force. It arrived and both had a shape and hadn't. A black storm came before him or it, sweeping some of dancers up into the air and tossing them into the void. The others were starting to flee but it was too late. Then I somehow knew something. Went into a sort of bunker and I knew that the Entity had a corporeal form in there, amongst us. I think I told Joseph about this and he set about stabbing it/him. I told him that wouldn't work because it was only assuming a body but killing the body wouldn't kill it. He said he knew it would, at least for a while. The problem was different but he thought he had the solution. It was kind of part of us or us of it, so it could read our mind and anticipate intention but he thought he could not think about what he was about to do until the moment of doing it. I didn't say what I thought -it couldn't possibly work... I could see 'him' or it approaching and made for an exit, as I knew he would read in my mind what was going on. But then, just as I went through the threshold of the door into the blinding light of outside I knew that 'he' knew and knew all along... the only escape would be to wake up.

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